Modern hospitals and health centers today usually have several computerized systems for medical information gathering, exchange, storage and processing. Herein such a system is referred to as a “data source”. Medical information may come in textual, voice, sound, graphical, and image modalities. Such medical information may be required by authorized personnel, including those located outside the hospital premises, and equipped with computers of some sort. Herein the requiring side is referred to as the “user”. In present systems the users are equipped with their own software to access the data source. Difficulties in the use of such computerized systems are caused by such things as the varied networking procedures required to fetch the data, the lack of an industry standard, the lack of an easy to use user interface and, in the case of image data transfer, the channel bandwidth requirements along with the typically large volumes of the image information, which in turn translates into very long transmission periods. In addition to that, a typical user might be required to master the skills of operating a large number of software systems like those used with various data processors, the varied communication software, software installations procedures, etc. The system administrator needs to install the different types of application software in large numbers of computers, and update this software, in each computer, every time a new version is used. This proliferation of software and hardware in the medical data processing systems make such systems difficult to maintain and a burden to update.
Presently, more and more hospitals and clinics are uniting for economic reasons to form healthcare enterprises with consolidated resources, having a single headquarters for managing the organization. The consolidation of resources also takes place inside individual hospitals, with the primary goal of facilitating data exchanges inside the hospital, with hospital personnel outside the hospital premises, as well as with other related facilities and with the enterprise headquarters. Generally, most individual facilities that make up the enterprise operate special systems to store and manage various parts of their clinical data. One can generally view these systems as being composed of data acquisition devices, data storage devices (data banks), and data management and communication modules. The users are connected to the data banks via various networking procedures and communications protocols. These users may operate a variety of computer hardware systems. Access of each user to stored patient data is presently done through the use of special application software on the user's computer. Since presently, most health and medical organizations have constructed their information systems and communications network over a period of time, access to these systems is often complicated, and sometimes requires the user to master several application, software and communication protocols. Typically, no common access method or user interface is available to the user, and users are often confined to the use of particular hardware at a specific location to access the data. The need to access image data further complicates the situation. The large bandwidth required from the communications link, the large data volumes, and the special processing that is usually needed, often requires the use of special software and hardware on the user's side.
Thus, one problem encountered with the present server-user communication systems for transferring medical data is the many different interfaces, software applications, and communication protocols required and the many different types of work stations that make up the “installed base”. Due to this proliferation of different work stations requiring different software applications, interfaces and communications protocols, then whenever a new improved system or a new data type become available, the many different work stations have to be equipped with the software for utilizing the new systems or data. This is not only expensive, but time consuming in that the installation of the software in each of the many different work stations and the central server requires time and usually requires expertise beyond that of the doctor or medical professional using the workstation.
A second and equally troublesome problem is encountered when the data requested by the user includes images that must be transmitted over a given enterprise network. This is due to the long time required for transmitting image data as compared to other forms of data. Image compression is used to reduce transmission times. For clinical image data, special precautions must be taken if lossy compression is implemented, due to the potential loss of possibly vital findings. Lossless compression schemes are therefore employed, which provide a relatively small reduction of image transmission time (a factor of 2–3 for radiology images). Interactive compression schemes, that optimize the transmission time for any given user and user type are currently not available in existing healthcare information systems. Such an interactive compression scheme is presented as part of this invention.
The above can be summarized in a conceptual diagram (FIG. 1). An enterprise wide healthcare information system 11 may be conceptually conceived as comprising several local facilities, 12–14, connected to a central facility 16. Each local facility comprises data sources 17 connected through appropriate interfaces such as interface 18, to the local network, to which the various local users 19 are connected too. The local network of each local facility is in turn connected to the central facility through another interface (possibly including firewalls and security features). The central facility comprises a similar structure, with the addition of central repositories 23, data bases, and data management tools. This structure of the presently available systems suffers from the problems described above. Thus those skilled in the art are still searching for effective solution to the existing problems.